From Wonder to Uncertainty – A Reading Journey Through Cosmology

My first real encounter with cosmology—outside of science fiction—came surprisingly early. I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov. In Swedish it was titled Svarta hål och kosmiska ägg (“Black Holes and Cosmic Eggs”), which, in hindsight, might be one of the most wonderfully strange titles imaginable for a middle school student browsing a library shelf.

I found it while preparing a five-minute school presentation—and ended up reading the entire book twice.

When the day came to present, I enthusiastically talked about stellar fusion in the Sun, how stars evolve over time, and how massive stars can collapse into neutron stars or black holes. Looking back, I suspect most of my classmates were completely lost somewhere between hydrogen fusion and gravitational collapse. But I also remember the teacher seeming impressed, which probably reinforced the feeling that I had stumbled onto something exciting.

More importantly, that book opened a door—and I never quite closed it again.

Up until then I had been a heavy reader, regularly bringing home bags of books from the library—but almost all of them were fiction. Asimov’s book was the first time I encountered a popular science work that targeted subjects I was deeply curious about. Even though The Collapsing Universe had already aged somewhat—it was published in 1977, with the Swedish edition appearing in 1983—it was more than enough to ignite an interest in cosmology and theoretical physics.

Enter Hyperspace

A few years later came the next shift—not just in subject, but in scale.

By this point I had largely switched from reading in Swedish to reading in English, and somewhere along the way I picked up Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. If Asimov had opened the door to cosmology, Kaku blew it wide open.

This was my first real exposure to string theory and higher-dimensional physics. Kaku’s writing had a way of making extremely abstract ideas feel almost tangible. The concept that our universe might contain hidden dimensions beyond the familiar three of space and one of time was utterly mind-bending.

Even if I only understood parts of the physics, the broader picture was intoxicating. It suggested that modern theoretical physics was exploring questions every bit as imaginative as the science fiction I loved reading.

If Asimov had shown me how the universe worked, Kaku made it feel like we were only seeing a fraction of it.

The Elegant Universe

The next major milestone arrived with Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (1999).

Greene’s book became something of a landmark in popular science writing about string theory. Where Kaku had introduced the ideas, Greene gave them a sweeping narrative: unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, vibrating strings replacing point particles, and a possible “theory of everything” hiding somewhere within higher-dimensional geometry.

For a while, string theory didn’t just seem plausible—it felt inevitable.

Greene’s follow-up book, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), broadened the scope beyond string theory itself. This was also, if I remember correctly, where I first encountered Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics—the idea that every quantum possibility might branch into its own universe.

For a reader already fascinated by cosmology, that concept was difficult to forget.

Ten Years of String Theory

For roughly a decade, string theory remained one of the most intellectually exciting ideas I had encountered.

But slowly, almost reluctantly, doubts began to creep in.

Part of the problem was the absence of experimental evidence. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN had been expected—at least by some—to reveal hints of new particles or symmetries that might support certain theoretical frameworks connected to string theory or supersymmetry. Instead, the results were stubbornly silent.

The theories became increasingly elaborate. Predictions shifted. The goalposts moved—subtly at first, then more noticeably. New particles were proposed at higher and higher energy scales.

Around 2007 I read Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong. The book argued that string theory had drifted too far into mathematically elegant speculation without producing testable predictions. At the time, the critique felt unsettling but also difficult to dismiss.

The deeper issue was philosophical: beautiful mathematics is not the same thing as empirical science—and at some point, the two had started to drift apart.

Beauty and Truth

This theme resurfaced again years later when I began reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog, which often critiques the role of aesthetic preferences—symmetry, elegance, mathematical beauty—in guiding modern theoretical physics.

Her book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) sharpened that critique considerably. The argument is not that mathematical beauty has no place in physics—it clearly has historically been a powerful guide—but that it may have become overly dominant in areas where experimental feedback is scarce.

What made this critique resonate wasn’t just the argument itself—it was how clearly it matched a growing unease I hadn’t quite been able to articulate.

For me, that book may have been the final step in letting go of the hope that string theory would soon deliver a revolutionary breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.

None of this means the theory was worthless. Quite the opposite: it generated enormous amounts of sophisticated mathematics and inspired decades of research. But whether it ultimately explains physical reality remains an open question.

Shifting Interests

Looking back, these books—Asimov, Kaku, Greene, Woit, and later Hossenfelder—trace a clear intellectual arc. Not just in what they explain, but in how they frame the process of science itself.

They begin with wonder and discovery, move through excitement about a potential grand unifying theory, and eventually arrive at a more cautious perspective about how science actually progresses.

I’ve noticed another shift over time as well. As I’ve gotten older, my reading has gradually moved from fiction toward nonfiction. Last year, for the first time ever, I read more nonfiction books than fiction books.

If you’re curious about that shift, I wrote more about it in my reading recap for 2025.

Interestingly, this curiosity about the structure of the universe wasn’t my only scientific obsession as a teenager. Around the same period I became equally fascinated with genetics after reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Later I devoured a number of genetics courses when Coursera first launched.

But that is probably a story for another post.

Cosmology, after all, is already big enough for one—and perhaps the most enduring part of that early fascination is not the answers, but the questions that never quite go away.